Dec. 17 — Advanced Clustering Technologies this week installed a new HPC cluster to meet the current and future high performance computing needs at Washington University in St. Louis. The university supports a large, diverse user community including researchers from disciplines not usually associated with HPC such as Economists and Radiologists.
“We needed a heterogeneous mix of hardware to support the wide variety of applications being run on our systems,” said Malcolm Tobias, Systems Manager and Technical Programmer for Washington University in St. Louis. “Like everyone else, we can never have enough fast storage.”
Initially, the university envisioned a cluster with 1,000 compute cores, but that plan was cost-prohibitive.
“We went back to the table and proposed the new Intel Haswell processors while other vendors were offering the previous generation,” said John Gannon, account executive at Advanced Clustering. “This gave us an edge in the end but initially it was a disadvantage as the new processors had no real field use at the time. Our team did extensive testing with the new processors and helped with a presentation that demonstrated the advantages of more cores with fewer nodes.”
The university also wanted a fast storage system of 100 terabytes. Working within the university’s limited budget for storage, Advanced Clustering recommended a Lustre file system and were able to show how this would mean cost savings while still meeting the requirement of greater than 10 gigabytes per second.
“It was easy to look back at the previous five years to see how our cluster has been used, but much more challenging to predict how a new cluster might be used five years down the road,” Tobias said. “We aimed to spec out a configuration to meet our current needs and give us enough flexibility to expand in whichever direction the future dictates. Advanced Clustering helped us understand how various hardware and software solutions could allow us to gain cost savings while maintaining the level of computing power that we needed,” Tobias explained.
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Source: Advanced Clustering Technologies